How to Save Loads of Time Managing Daily Attendance
Whether it’s your Office Manager or Attendance Officer, managing daily attendance likely takes up hours of someone’s time every single day. Recording absences, chasing absences, following up on missing marks and incomplete registers… Dealing with it all eats away at the time you want to spend doing other things – like using your attendance data to target improvements, or providing that personal touch with families who really need the support.
Here’s how you can save time on those daily tasks and free up time for work that makes a bigger impact.
Save Time Recording Absences
Recording absence with Studybugs couldn’t be easier. Parents send absence reports securely via the app or website; it comes through to your online portal for you to record and mark in the register. And if you have Studybugs Attendance, the whole process is automatic, saving you even more time.
This slick process means that an average of 84% of absence reports are received and processed before 9am, saving you vast amounts of time and letting you get on with your day.
Some schools are understandably hesitant to take away the personal aspect of speaking to parents and verifying absences over the phone. But we’re not suggesting you spend any less time personally speaking to parents. You can just shift that time away from the run-of-the-mill illness absences to families who really need the personal support – the child struggling with anxiety, the family with transport issues, or those with additional needs – so you can make a bigger impact.
As for verifying absence reports, Studybugs has a robust process: we match parents’ details with the information in your MIS, meaning 100% of absence reporters are verified. If there’s any doubt, we immediately alert you to take a look.
Automatically Chase Unexplained Absences
Schools using Studybugs can have up to 100% fewer unexplained absences to chase, thanks to our streamlined absence reporting process. We can also speed up the process of actually chasing them – through automated parent alerts.
Studybugs provides a variety of alerts for parents to keep them in the loop about their children’s attendance. This includes automated absence chasers. Simply create your message template, specify when it should send, and it’ll send to any children with ‘N’ marks in the register each morning.
Quickly Address Incomplete Registers and Missing Marks
Making sure every child is accounted for is obviously a vital safeguarding duty. So when registers are incomplete, it’s critical to follow up quickly. Studybugs helps you do this in three ways:
- Staff can receive alerts to notify them of missing marks in today’s registers.
- Admin staff can filter the attendance dashboard to show missing marks.
- For Primary schools using Studybugs Registers, teachers will also see a warning if their register hasn’t been completed.
All this means you can quickly find missing marks and follow up to ascertain a pupil’s whereabouts. It also means you don’t end up with a huge list of missing marks to correct ahead of census day or an inspection (although if you do need to find historical missing marks, you can use Studybugs Assistant). See our previous blog post for more on handling missing marks.
30 Days of Staff Time Freed Up Each Year
All these time-saving features add up to a whopping 30 days of extra staff time every year (based on a 300 pupil school). That’s a whole extra half a term you can put to better use.
“Studybugs has completely streamlined the way we manage attendance at our school. We are
able to more efficiently, quickly and collaboratively manage attendance in the mornings, and SLT are able to keep
a closer eye on strategic attendance issues.”
– Russell Kinch, Assistant Headteacher, New Moston Primary School, Manchester
We love helping schools hone their attendance practices. To see for yourself how Studybugs could save you time
every day (and make other improvements),
— Lucas Abbott